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On Sept. 10, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced a series of initiatives to expand Canada’s defence capabilities and support Ukraine.
Industry participants say Ukraine, now in its fifth year of war with Russia, has considerable battlefield experience Canada can learn from.
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Six Canadian defence suppliers [aare] receiving federal contracts worth up to $50 million in total to produce drones and uncrewed ground vehicles.
Last week, Carney also announced a partnership between Ottawa-based General Dynamics Mission Systems-Canada and Ukrainian company Green Tech Harvest to produce drones and related technologies.
That partnership is the latest in a series of Canada-Ukraine drone arrangements. In May, Hamilton-based Sentinel Research and Development also announced a drone production agreement with Ukrainian defence company Airlogix.
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The goal is ambitious: to give Canadian industry the capacity to produce “millions of drones over the next two years,” according to the Prime Minister’s Office.
Ottawa says the initial contracts will “increase the number of drones currently deployed by the Canadian Armed Forces tenfold.”
Much of this production will go to Ukraine.
“Thirty per cent of these drones will go to Ukraine immediately to [the] battlefield,” Zelenskyy said during the joint press conference with Carney.
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Sergii Vlashchenko and Igor Kolosiuk, Ukrainian defence-technology experts and co-founders of Vancouver-based Snake Island Lab, say such qualities have enabled Ukraine to hold its own against a larger and wealthier Russia.
“Every large brigade, every army corps … has its own research and development laboratory, manufacturing capabilities, and financing capabilities inside the corps,” Vlashchenko said in a joint interview with Kolosiuk.
“It lets them face a challenge, invent to overcome it, and manufacture the response within weeks.”
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A June study found that Ukrainian producers could move from prototype to deployment in weeks, with some minor fixes implemented within 24 hours.
The cost benefits of this approach are considerable.
Ukraine spends as little as US$200 to $1,000 on a typical FPV drone. Before Ukraine popularized these drones, the U.S. military could have previously spent as much as US$53,000 for the closest equivalent.
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Kolosiuk says Ukraine is looking to Canada for a more secure supply chain. He says the two countries could build a scalable, non-Chinese supply chain serving both the Canadian and Ukrainian militaries.
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Lots of reddit users have come over in the past two years, which brings both the general chud culture of reddit, and politically illiterate liberals who merely need a nudge to embrace facsism.
Because overt bigotry and promotion of right-wing politics is typically frowned upon and easily moderated, it is popular for bad actors to simply post article links and headlines that promote those values, but aren’t openly advocating for them.
For example, you couldn’t say “trans women are pesos” on r/Canada (probably even now), but you can post a bunch of headlines about the few trans women who are convicted of CSV crimes. So, when you’re looking for chud or chud bots, you look for both spews of “news” posts, and what values are prevalent if not explicit in those posts I.e. OP’s constant spew of pro-Eu, anti-China news headlines with some safe anti-US (but not anti-imperialist) undertones.
The only reason to not see this as obvious promotion of right wing politics is if someone already subscribed to the EuroAmerican flavour of liberal rationalizations of capitalist and colonial violence, and therefore assumes that anything pro-Europe and anti-China/US is “progressive.” They are chud narratives that are intuitively true to Canadian libs who fancy themselves as “leftists” or “progressive” while appealing to their more authentically capitalist and fascist values.